Hideki Itoh's donut icons are sitting on my computer desktop, and they're giving me the munchies. They hover in tiny, gemlike perfection in their open folder, lined up in rows neater than you'd find at any Tim Hortons, each one bearing a descriptive label. Plain. Chocolate. Mocha Cream. French Cruller. Sprinkle. Sugar Raised. And all the accoutrements, too: Coffee, Sugar Pot, Paper Bag, Box To Go. Yum!

Itoh is a leading light of what may be the world's most obscure and far-flung art community. Icon artists rarely meet. They converse only by email and through websites such as IconFactory and IconTown, and they never see each other's work in the flesh. It doesn't even exist in the flesh--only as teeny bitmapped onscreen images that, in Itoh's case, he posts as freeware on his website .

A lot of so-called icon art is unimaginative dreck, a flood of images copied from science fiction, cartoons, and other realms of pop culture. Itoh hoes a different row, as the titles of his icon sets reveal: Hide's Box & Container, Hide's Cleaning, Hide's Coffee, Hide's Grocery, Hide's Sushi, Hide's Tools, Hide's Bathroom. He is a playful fetishist of everyday objects. "I enjoy looking at the packaging of products, and the colour and shape of daily goods and food," he says. "I want to capture, emphasize, and express the beauty and charm of these things."

Itoh by day is a software engineer in southern California. He is now in his mid-30s and began making primitive icons on his Macintosh SE over a decade ago, while he was still living in his native Japan. Over the years, he has developed a distinctive style, in which shading and an overhead, three-quarter-view perspective are key components.

Much of the appeal of his work comes from the incredible detail he crams into his 32x32-pixel canvas and palette of 256 colours. He doesn't care whether or not you call him an artist, but he's a purist about technique. He's committed to the old-school icon-making method of "pushing" pixel by pixel, and has a nostalgic attachment to the "jaggies" that form the edge of icons made in this way. It's a rare dedication to process, in an era when anyone can use Photoshop to shrink a ready-made image into icon form in about three seconds. "I can see no creator's originality there," Itoh complains. "There's gotta be something original if you call it 'art'."

Many Japanese computer nerds share his passion, which leads Itoh to speculate that icon art may have a common lineage with the country's older miniaturist traditions like origami. Both, he believes, draw on a manual dexterity that derives from Japan's "chopstick culture." He also points out the formalized, rule-bound nature of much traditional Japanese culture, such as haiku, kabuki, and ikebana. "Limitation in size and colour can also be interpreted as formalities," Itoh says. "Japanese icon artists enjoy expressing their originality under such formalities."

While his icons are downloaded by devotees of desktop style the world over, Itoh himself doesn't use them much on his own desktop. He prefers to click open his icon sets once in a while and view the whole set framed by the folder, "just like I enjoy looking at a painting in a frame on a wall."

It's a good strategy. Seeing the full set allows you to appreciate the lovingly taxonomic quality of the work. It also seems to reveal some new element each time you look--like the way Itoh cheerfully dissolves scale. In the Hide's Tools set, objects that in real life are massively disparate in size--a box of nails, a router, a table saw--appear to have been run through some homogenizing Shrinkerator.

And there they sit, cheek by jowl in equitable 32x32-pixel glory, brightening your day with the carefree, smile-making charm of a cheap plastic toy set.

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